All major browsers fall during second day at Pwn2Own hacking contest

Security researchers demonstrated zero-day exploits against Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Adobe Flash Player during the second day of the Pwn2Own hacking competition Thursday, racking up total prizes of US$450,000.

A team from French vulnerability research firm Vupen hacked Google Chrome by exploiting a use-after-free vulnerability that affects both the WebKit and Blink rendering engines. The researchers then successfully bypassed Chrome's sandbox protection to execute arbitrary code on the underlying system.

Another anonymous researcher presented a Chrome remote code execution exploit Thursday, but the contest judges declared it only a partial win because some details of the hack were similar to those of an exploit presented earlier at Pwnium, Google's own hacking contest that runs aside Pwn2Own.

Well known iPhone and PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, known online as geohot, demonstrated a remote code execution exploit against Firefox, making it the competition's fourth successful hack against Mozilla's browser. Aside from Team Vupen, security researchers Jüri Aedla and Mariusz Mlynski had also compromised Firefox during the first day of the contest by exploiting different vulnerabilities.

On Thursday, researchers Sebastian Apelt and Andreas Schmidt demonstrated a browser-based exploit against Microsoft Internet Explorer that chained together two use-after-free vulnerabilities and a Windows kernel bug to open the Windows calculator application, proving remote code execution.

Another researcher, Liang Chen of the Chinese Keen Team, combined a heap overflow vulnerability with a sandbox bypass to achieve remote code execution through Apple Safari. He and fellow researcher Zeguang Zhou of team509 then demonstrated a remote code execution exploit for Adobe Flash Player.

All the vulnerabilities exploited during Pwn2Own were shared with the vendors of the affected products.

The prizes won during the second and final day of the competition put the total contest payout to a record $850,000, not including charitable donations or the value of the test laptops won by the researchers after their successful hacks.

During a side challenge dubbed Pwn4Fun, security researchers from Google competed against researchers from Hewlett-Packard's DVLabs Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) who organize the Pwn2Own contest. The Google team hacked Apple Safari and the ZDI team hacked IE11 by combining multiple exploits. The challenge raised $82,500 for the Canadian Red Cross.

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